Mobile devices with various methods of connectivity are now for many people becoming the primary gateway to the internet and also a major storage point for personal information. This is in addition to the normal range of personal computers and furthermore sensor devices plus internet based providers. Combining these devices together and lately the applications (e.g., including user interface elements of these applications) and the information stored by those applications is a major challenge of interoperability. Consequently, manufacturers of mobile devices (e.g., cellular phones) are challenged to continually improve information privacy in smaller and variable form factors, to ensure data privacy while providing ubiquitous access to data and/or internet connections over, for instance, cellular data connections.
At the same time, there has been development of distributed systems for managing information and related applications and/or processes and providing access to a wide range of a user's own information and potentially any information that has been shared to the user, wherein a user may be a person, a group of people, or some other entity or collection of entities. Additionally, these distributed systems facilitate interaction with information sources through the use of mobile wireless devices and support collaborative operations on shared data representations. The computers in a distributed system environment may communicate with other participants in the system and provide requested information through transmission of information as text, speech and visual displays.
However, despite the fact that information accessible by users can be distributed with different levels of granularity, still there is a challenge to achieve information privacy within heterogeneous network environments, wherein information with various levels of granularity and various structures is provided by and transmitted among various independent sources.